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Women In Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique

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During the 1950s a woman was seen as someone striving to become the perfect feminine entity, and this was expected by others just as much as themselves. Even though the majority responded to this expected image in a condescending way, they still felt something missing, which caused many women to be miserable. This particular predicament of women is especially well explained in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. The 1950s was an awkward moment for women precisely because of the missing something which they felt. However, while it was an awkward moment for women in history, it was also a turning point for them.
Women throughout history were living in a society, for the majority, dominated by men, but the 1950s was the beginning of a transition …show more content…

They were seen as the ones who developed the next generation. They were raised to be good mothers and wives and bring up their daughters to do the same and to bring up their sons to be good men that will make good choices as leaders. It was this logic that made it difficult for women to do anything other than what society expected of them. If they weren’t married or raising children then, they were considered to not be doing their part. If they were pursuing an education (for reasons other than finding a husband) they were considered to be lacking as a woman and or were pitied (Friedan …show more content…

This also provides further evidence that women were living in a society dominated by men, and if a woman was to live as society told her she would not be complete. The latter however, would be a woman who wanted more than what society had to offer, but not allowed or made exceedingly difficult to achieve it by society. All this is mentioned in The Feminine Mystique, which accurately portrays women’s struggles in the

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In her essay, “The Importance of Work,” from The Feminine Mystique published in 1963, Betty Friedan confronts American women’s search for identity. Throughout the novel, Betty Friedan breaks new ground, concocting the idea that women can discover personal fulfillment by straying away from their original roles. Friedan ponders on the idea that The Feminine Mystique is the cause for a vast majority of women during that time period to feel confined by their occupations around the house; therefore, restricting them from discovering who they are as women. Friedan’s novel is well known for creating a different kind of feminism and rousing various women across the nation.

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In the 1960s women were subjected to follow a trail, wed in her early twenties and start a family and dedicate her life to house chores. In 1962, Betty Friedan was a female that created the feminist movement. She wrote a book called “The Feminine Mystique”. The book was about the hindrance and misery of a group of school-cultured housewives who felt imprisoned. Friedan dumbfounded the nation by opposing the believed perception, that housewives were satisfied to help their families and by calling on women to pursue serenity in work outside the home.

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A woman could work just as hard as a man but sadly most people in the 1950’s could not see that. In any job or sort of work, a woman will be treated as if they are less than a man or a “second class citizen” just because of their gender. Girls who want jobs and to earn their place in society will soon see that this was a hard thing for a woman to do. The women of the 1950s though must tell them to stand up for themselves for that is the only way that they can climb in society and defeat the “suburban housewife” mold that will try to be shoved upon them. A young women of the 1950’s could not accept privileges nor prejudices because of their gender or they are just as bad and hopeless as the “suburban

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“They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights – the independence and the opportunities” (Friedan, 1963, p.16). This is what people believed to be the truth about women, so this is what women did. Women eventually desired this role and dreamed of being the ‘perfect housewife’; Friedan wrote that things escalated to the point that “Millions of women lived their lives in the image of those pretty pictures of the American suburban housewife” (Friedan, 1963,

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